Melissa Anderson

McKay's bumptious movie awkwardly combines fourth-wall-breaking gimmickry and flaccid indignation with the goofball energy that defines his comedies.

Despite the nonstop banality, Johnson remains the sole source of allure: Her sleepy eyes suggest nights devoted to pleasure inconceivable to James.

Hoping to distract us from the zero ideas found in his film, Levinson demands that his cast act loudly and unbearably, a task for which Demi Moore, as the second wife of Ellen's first husband, is perfectly suited.

Spread becomes a sloggy, tepid comeuppance tale.

Audiard himself might have benefited from a simple reminder of left from right; his rudderless film confuses a pileup of preposterous, sentimental scenarios with genuine emotion.

The tears and recriminations, eruptions and reconciliations hold a begrudging fascination for about an hour.... After that, though, the volume is never turned down and these characters are never less than the most unendurable company.

Wiig's cheering presence in an otherwise depleting project/cross-promoted product highlights the fact that Zoolander 2 is a referendum on dying industries: not just the portfolio of Condé Nast titles that Wintour oversees as artistic director, but also the Frat Pack.

What's most crushing is witnessing what should have been the dream pairing of Kunis and Timberlake - both foxy, loose, confident performers - here generating zero chemistry.

The greatest frustration-not just in For Colored Girls, but in Perry's entire oeuvre-is witnessing talented (and often criminally underemployed) actresses struggle with the material they've been given.

Isabelle and Gérard's regrets and laments about their parenting skills betray no bone-deep rue or shame but are delivered with all the conviction of two luminaries merely running their lines.

Though its structure may be whittled down in comparison with the earlier works, Biutiful is even more morbidly obese than "Babel" in terms of soggy ideas, elephantine with miserabilist humanism and redemption jibber-jabber.

Binoche's hushed histrionics, though, are of a piece with the fruity portentousness of L'Attesa.

This toothless, silken-looking satire takes aim at easy targets: white Williamsburg ennui, technology, yoga.

Sheridan, repeatedly drawn to family sagas, including his own (2002's In America), aims for Greek tragedy but ends up with a PTSD melodrama, with Maguire able to produce slobber almost as effortlessly as Portman can summon up tears--essentially all her role calls for.

A misguided tale of sentimental education.

The mild Islamophobia and highly questionable casting choices in the film call to mind other texting abbreviations, namely AYFKMWTS and GTFOOH. In the end, though, it's an armed-forces acronym dating back to World War II that best describes this dismal project: FUBAR.

Close's prosthetic makeup renders her face too immobile, a marked contrast with her unfixed accent; both highlight the pitfalls of a star's idée fixe. It's a shame, because the material - based on a novella by George Moore published in the 1927 collection Celibate Lives - deserves better.

Glatze's blog entries are read aloud by Franco, an infamous graduate-degree collector not so long ago, in a voice that suggests poetry-MFA earnestness, horrible acting, or both.

Its characters are all too easily determined but never specific—or memorable.

As generic and impersonal as a new credit card offer, Jodie Foster’s Money Monster is the latest big-studio production to try to cash in on populist outrage over Wall Street abuses and New Gilded Age inequality.

A sprawling mess of multiple romantic triangles in which all the angles are obtuse.

Blind Side the movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.

Proceeds as a tedious, clumsy diddle, constantly reminding viewers how much progress has been made since the Victorian era.

Outrageously sentimental and retrograde.

Fifty years after her death, the actress's corpse is still being picked over with ever-diminishing returns, as evidenced in Liz Garbus's garish, misguided documentary.

Grossly exaggerating his characters' either/or constructions, Moodysson forgoes any real ideas about the world's vast inequities, content to pummel his audience with portentous global guilt-tripping.

If Markell's instincts for script exhumation are questionable, she's the victim of even worse timing: Who thought releasing her film 10 days after Liv Ullmann and Cate Blanchett's praised-to-the-high-heavens "A Streetcar Named Desire" closed was a good idea?

Another movie, not as awful as this one, might one day find better use for the easygoing vibe between Queen Latifah and Common, the stars of Just Wright.